Pictures from a burnt book taken with a broken phone, to honour an artist who, more than any other, helped me realise my place was among monsters. The book is the 1988 2000AD annual – published in 1987 – and the pictures are from a feature asking its creative team of "droids" to choose their favourite covers from previous year. Of the eighteen images chosen, six are by Kevin O'Neill. Hyperbole is the comic book's stock-in-trade, but "thrill power" was a real thing, and O'Neill drew covers you just really wanted to show people, like something inexplicable found under a hedge or a world opening up in your satchel. Sorry for these poor reproductions but maybe new-comers shouldn't see these too clearly...
chosen by Glenn Fabry
chosen by Brendan McCarthy
chosen by Pat Mills
chosen by Cam Kennedy
chosen by Bryan Talbot
And Kevin O'Neill operated on my brain. Thanks, Kevin, and I'm deeply sorry you left today.
In 2000AD's "D.R. & Quinch go to Hollywood" two alien sociopaths steal a handwritten screenplay from a corpse at a bus-depot only to discover once their bravado has ensured the project's greenlighting that, apart from the third word of the title which might be "oranges", the script is totally illegible.
Fortunately the star they've procured, known simply as Marlon, is not only an unintelligible mumbler but also, secretly, completely unable to read, and so their secret is safe, unlimited "stuff that was sort of useful-looking" is purchased, and filming begins reardless. More than "Hearts of Darkness", more than "8 and 1/2", more than "Lost In La Mancha", more than "Fitzcarraldo", Jim Shenk's superb promotional documentary charting George Lucas' making of Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace reminds me of "D.R. and Quinch Go to Hollywoood".
I'd already seen clips in Mike Stoklasa's brilliant, infamous and quite educational 70-Minute Phantom Menace Review (here) but hadn't realised how little cherry-picking he'd needed to do. The documentary's an astonishingly candid portrait of a workforce with the power to build worlds harnessed to a mind too lazy and/or frightened to remember to say "action". Only once, at the very end does Lucas look like he either knows or cares what he's talking about, in the sound editing of the Pod Race, and it's heart-breaking because that's exactly what everyone was waiting for all this time, and it's far too late. And everyone wanted this to work. Frank Oz looked so excited to be handling Yoda again. Ewan McGregor looked so happy working his nuts off as Obi Wan, bonding efforlessly with a frightened, miscast ten-year-old Anakin whom he'd end up having next to no scenes with. And I've already wrote about Ahmed Best. But George Lucas doesn't know what to do with any of it. Shenk's "Making Of" never actually goes so far as to say "and the film was inevitably
shit", it just fades mercifully to silence on an audience
cheering wildly over the opening scrawl – and hey, look, if you actually like the film, then this is a thrilling account of a maverick artist's triumph over adveristy.
GALACTIC GREETINGS! Continuing the kidultification of this blog, here's the latest contribution to our gang's fortnightly quiz brought to you by none other than The Mighty Tharg himself, pretend editor of 2000AD. (I was worried my round might be a bit weak, so made this even weaker video to put the tin lid on it.) Un-jumble the covers from their red comic sans captions please. Answers as ever will be posted in the comments.
1.
"I OPERATED ON MY OWN BRAIN!!!"
2.
"ER... DEMOCRACY!"
3.
"COME HERE, FOOD!"
4.
"FLAMIN' NAZIS! 'AVE A TASTE OF TOMMY'S COLD STEEL!"
I finally started watching Parks and Recreation last week, and yet, somehow, I'm already on series three. Thirty episodes in, the show seems to have reached a point the American Office wouldn't
reach until its eighth season: coasting along on extraordinary charm after losing its motor, and that's weird to feel just two seasons into a seven or eight season run. It's stopped being a show about a woman who wants to build a
park, and that's a shame, as I was really loving that show. Also, Mark Brenadanawicz has left, the one character who seemed genuinely based on observed human behaviour, so I might not finish it. Speaking of not finishing things, to honour the passing of yet another day in which I didn't even get started on finishing the latest episode of Simon Goes Full Shakespeare, for this evening's blog I have photographed a few things left even longer...
Thing One: Putting up my paintings.
Tuesday will mark the second anniversary of my moving into this flat. They're going to look great when they're up though.
Thing Two: The 2000AD Zarjaz 100-Page Xmas Mega-Special, 2019.
And all progs following.
Thing Three: Finally understanding relativity.
Special theory or General, I don't mind which. Back in December, I hit a wall roundabout page 54 of Frank Close's Nothing: A Very Short Introduction, when he started talking about electric charges without, as far as I could spot, explaining what an electric charge actually is. I mean, I know its effects. But what physically is a charge? Are "positive" and "negative" just names we gave them, and if so, what's the point of saying "opposites attract" if they're only "opposites" because we named them after opposites? Without understanding any of this, everything following has to be taken on trust, which given that it's all thought experiments, means I'm lost, and Do Not Get It. Similarly, I hit a wall in George Gamow's Mr. Tompkins In Wonderland roundabout this illustration (no pun intended):
But, since these are the books I'd chosen to read, this means I've also hit a wall in reading generally, because I really want to finish these first. But take a sentence like Close's "he made a series of 'thought experiments', more usually referred to by their German analogue 'gedankenexperiment'." Are they? "More usually"? Really?
I should move on. I know.
I can't.
Thing Four: The sky above Prague.
Viewers of my Journal of the Plague Yearreadings may remember me receiving this puzzle back in April. But it's just sky. Also though... Sorry, but "an electric charge at rest relative to you, in an inertial
frame, gives rise to an electric field, so in this situation you
perceive there to be an electric field where previously you felt
magnetism"? So, Frank, are you saying that magnets stop working if you
move them, because I'm perfectly happy to believe that, and I get that
this is meant to be weird, but I just want to be sure that's what you're
saying. Also I don't know what a field is.
Given this is a stock-taking, it's only fair on myself to end by noting that, firstly: I did get something done today – someone online was looking for plays so I ran a spellcheck on, and tweaked yet another ending for, Jonah Non Grata...
We interrupt this protracted conclusion to Frankenstein Wednesdays - and by "we", I mean "I" - and by "interrupt", I mean "put off" - to notify readers that they have just one day left to listen HERE to a pinnacle of spoofery: 1985 - simultaneously the most accessible and least accessible Goon Show ever recorded. Least accessible, because its employment of 1984 to satirise the BBC (or "Big Brother Corporation") means a third of it is just in-jokes about the broadcasting landscape of 1955*. Most accessible, because the other two thirds contain some of the stongest jokes the show's ever had; idiots just seem
funnier in a dystopia, possibly because they're necessary. The Orwellian backdrop also proves a perfect fit for The Goon Show's long-nursed post-Imperial anxieties. A fallen world host to competing and absurdly overrated hiearchies, surreally decorated with disappointing resources; you could draw a line from The Goon Show to Mad Max, with this episode sitting comfortably at the centre. It's the Judge-Dreddiest episode, and the one we quoted in the playground. The chief insipiration for it however was probably the BBC Television adaptation broadcast live a few months earlier, and starring Peter Cushing. I haven't watched it so post it below at this blog's peril, but let's see. There could be anything in it, Ray Ellington singing about "a one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store". Anything.
"Have you ever thought, in seventy years or so, there'll be nobody alive who could possibly understand this conversation we're having?"
As fan films go, "Search/Destroy" is hard to beat. It brings to life a futuristic mutant bounty hunter from the pages of "2000AD", along with his partner who, in that comic's glorious tradition of "just because", is a big ginger viking. Both Johnny Alpha and Wulf Sternhammer are lucky enough to pass as "norms" in a world where the egregiously mutated are regarded as barely human, but for all its various historical parallels Alpha's world isn't a metaphor for anything, just a miserably extrapolated backdrop against which the fun violence can happen. Still...
Sorry you've gone, Carlos Ezquerra.
It is specifically in the realisation of this world where I think "Search/Destroy" plays an absolute blinder. About eleven minutes in, our heroes approach the main baddie in his layer lair. From his insignia he's clearly politically aligned with Kreelman (the prick pictured above) so he's a Pulp Nazi, but he's also a "norm" like us rather than a foreigner, which is why he's drinking tea. And here's what gives me real chills when I watch the film: as a not-Nazi, the Colonel isn't listening to Wagner either. He's listening to Elgar. In Johnny Alpha's dystopian future, "Nimrod", that beautifully stirring, loved, and entirely familiar work, has become every bit as tainted as "Tristan und Isolde", and can serve as just as effective a lazy shorthand for evil. It's a brilliant touch, and one you couldn't do in a comic. Bravo, team.
Before I get to work on that insomniac
mind-punch however, this week sees me clowning around NOT ONLY in
London's glittering and highly monitered West End BUT ALSO in TWO
consecutive pleasings on the Radio 4, so let's rinse out that bin and FISH OUT THOSE PLUGS!
THIS EVENING, at half past six, you can hear Angstrom...
pronounced "ARNGstrom", and narrated by ME! Half of the retakes were because I pronounced it wrong. I also play Angstrom's boss "Bols
Aashol" - a further third of the retakes were me buggering that name up too. Here is a picture of the Swedish Meatball Hot Wrap I bought in
the lunch break to research my accent:
And TOMORROW EVENING at half past six you can hear the second episode of series SEVEN of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme. Go on, kiss your ears! Here is a picture of the effect episode one had on the internet:
("Stinkkalk"?)
And if twenty-three and a half hours is too long a wait between those two
doses of me, why not ALSO buy a ticket to tomorrow's as-yet-unsold-out
matinee of our London run of The Hound of the Baskervilles?
Or, if you can't get a ticket, why not listen to all SIX episodes of the Wireless Theatre Company's Adventures of Drayton Trench, recorded at London's Museum of Comedy which is smaller than the Radio Theatre?
OR download my appearance on International Waters back in September recorded in a big egg on Dean Street?
OR listen to the thrilling latest episode of the now AWARD-WINNING Monster Hunters - "Queen of the Yeti Men" (which I'm not in)? Here is the award!
Yes! I won an award! AND why not vote for Time Spanner over on the British Comedy Guide and give me another one? EH?
WHY NOT? WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU? AND WHAT THE HELL WERE THESE?
When producer Claire Broughton sent out a list of possible authors to spoof for the third series of Ian Leslie's Before They Were Famous I can't have been the only writer excited to see Alan Moore's name on it. How much of an overlap actually exists between fans of 2000AD (I smuggle John Wagner in there too) and Radio 4 comedy is another matter, but on a purely, selfishly personal level – considering this is the first time I've performed my own stuff on the radio, and possibly the first time the great man's been impersonated on Radio 4 – I couldn't be happier with how "Alan Moore's scripts for Fred Basset" turned out. Hey, Dave Gibbons tweeted me today! The artist of Watchmen? Yeah, him: "really funny (and accurate!)" he said - JUST SAYIN'! Sorry... But this is exactly why I've left it so long to write this post - I can't write charmingly about it, I'm too obnoxiously happy!
Anyway,
it's available to listen to for another month, with great work too from
Marc Haynes, Abi Burdess, Benet Brandreth and Alex Lowe as Alex Graham.
And here, for posterity and the deaf, is that bit in full:
- For one
extraordinarily prolific period in the 1980’s, Northampton-based writer and
cartoonist Alan Moore spearheaded a revolution in comics with such “graphic
novels” as “Watchmen” and “V for Vendetta”, both of which would later be turned
into big budget films from which Moore immediately disassociated himself. His
correspondence with artists often ran to hundreds of pages in length, providing
evidence of a garrulous polymath with a flair for the esoteric, driven to push
both collaborators and the boundaries of his chosen genre to their absolute
limit. One of Moore’s first correspondents was the Daily Mail’s Alex Graham,
who was looking for new blood to take over writing duties on his popular
dog-based cartoon strip “Fred Bassett”. Moore’s strips were never published,
but his scripts survive...
Hullo Alex!
Great
to hear you’re interested in running an eye, or preferably both, over my as yet
pretty much let’s face it about-as-untested-as-a-chat-up-line-in-a-bordello
efforts. Shall we crack on then? Fasten your seat belts, as the actress said to
the aeroplane, and eyes down for a full house..
Panel I:
Our hero, Fred
Bassett, dog, indoors, paws on windowsill, staring glumly out at a rainy day. Thought
bubble: “IT'S RAINING OUTSIDE... COLD, FAT DROPS POUNDING DOWN UPON A HUNGRY EARTH, TURNING INTO VIOLENT, BRIEF AND RECIPROCATING SOUP THE MUSTY INSECT CARTRIDGES THAT LITTER THE GOLF COURSE. THE WIFE OF THE HUMAN WHO CALLS HIMSELF MY OWNER SWERVES IN THE RAIN TO AVOID AN OBLIVIOUS FOX AND, FOR A SECOND, IS REMINDED SHE TOO IS BURSTABLE. THREE DOORS DOWN, A SLEEPING CHILD BREAKS INTO A COLD SWEAT AS HE DREAMS OF A SCHOOL OF SHARKS, EACH WEARING THE FACE OF HIS FATHER. ALL THIS... I SNIFF. DOGS CAN SMELL FEAR. IT IS 10.37 AM.”
Panel 2 -
Dear Alan,
Thanks very much
but I don’t think I’ll be able to get all that in the one bubble. Have you
anything with fewer words? I like the idea of Fred looking out of the window
though.
Yours in anticipation,
Alex Graham
Hullo Alex!
Uncle
Alan here. Point taken. Let’s go wordless. Comics are a visual medium, and the
absence of thought bubbles frees us from having to pretend a dog thinks in
sentences which, to my mind at least, seems marginally less likely than a
human thinking in smells. If you’re sitting comfortably then -
Panel I:
Fred
looking out of the rain-swept window, his nose glistening. Behind him, a
newspaper torn to shreds, the remnants of its headlines still visible. The word
fragments "-UCLEAR" "-MEGEDDON" and "IMMIN-".
Panel 2:
We pull back. Thirty
feet above the house, Fred still visible in the window. Next door a barbecue is
being rained off.
Panel 3: Pull back. We are above the clouds now but the
weather is clearing, The Swan visible in the gaps, its drunken patrons
searching their pockets for car keys. On one of the clouds: a
lip-stick-tube-shaped shadow.
Panel 4: Pull back. The Earth -
Dear Alan,
I don’t really want to draw that.
For one thing it’s
a hundred and twenty seven panels long, Fred Bassett traditionally runs to three
or four. For another, we’re outside the known universe as early as panel
thirteen, and I’m not comfortable drawing backgrounds on the best of days.
Shall we give it another go?
Yours, Alex
Graham.
Hullo Alex!
Message received. Onwards and upwards then, here’s the new script. Roll up your
sleeves, gird your loins, send the ladies out of the room, pull up a chair,
hoist the main brace, check your mirrors, press your trousers, pawn the silver,
hide the vicar, declog the veeblefetzers, check down the back of the sofa, fire
up the engines -
Alan, Alan…
That letter was
four hundred pages long and I was still on the introduction by page 103. In
happier news: The BBC has now said they’re interested in a television show with
no less a talent than Lionel Jeffries providing the voice of Fred. I hope
you’re as excited about this development as I am. Looking forward to something a bit shorter, Alex
Graham.
- Complying with
Graham’s request, Alan Moore’s next letter ran to just one sentence…
Burn what we have
wrought, Alex, burn it to the ground and we can but hope from the resultant
scorched earth a purer form may bloom.
- Graham turned next
to a fellow Scotsman famous for the terseness of his scripts. A colleague of
Moore’s, John Wagner would later create the ultra-violent, twenty-second
century lawman "Judge Dredd"...
Fred Bassett.
Panel I:
Owner to dog: “SAY WOOF, BOY. SAY WOOF.” Dog: “SHAN'T.” Panels 2-4:
Owner shoots dog in head with a complicated gun.
Pours petrol on dog.
Lights
match. Caption: ”WOOF!”
You’re
welcome.
And of
course Moore was actually a wiz at the animal-based comic strip.
Of course he was...
(From Philip Sandifier's exhaustive and ongoing
history of Moore: The Last War in Albion.)
This issue must have taken me ages. I was heavily into 2000AD by now, and who can blame me? My imagination had been pretty traumatised by a sudden move to public school at the age of nine, starved suddenly of mythology, baffled by "catalytic cracking" and "the ablative" and the absence of girls, sectioned by separate desks for every boy and separate teachers for every subject, sustained only by the scraps afforded by Mad Magazine and Oink. But then, in 1985, for just 24 pence a week, it found its salvation.
The late Massimo Belardinelli, just doin' his thing.
In fact it was struggling now to keep up. My hatred of that school had become so bad that I persuaded my parents to send me to a therapist, and of the one session I finally received the only detail I can remember now is me confessing my frustration that my imagination seemed so tiny compared to these guys'. How did they do it? Where - as Alan Moore was often asked, and possible went on to suffer a nervous breakdown trying to find out - do you get your ideas from? And it wasn't just the Alan Moore's stuff. There were the richly researched and nightmarishly illuminated worlds of Pat Mills, the surrealist panache of Peter Milligan's teen-friendly metaphysics, the aspirational shopping-mall dystopia of John Wagner's Mega-City One which teemed with poor, beaming, fad-chasing bastards seeking their fix of fun even in the cannon's mouth, and all of this served with wit - with jokes even - and monsters! So many monsters.
"Get off my back, Father!" Some Kevin O'Neill
There were no supermen, or at least none I was interested in. There were wanderers, terrorists, deserters, smugglers and surfers, very few of whom looked recognisably human. Everything 2000AD was teaching me was stuff I wanted to learn, and to this day I'm still playing catch-up as a writer. (The scifi pilot I've been hawking around, subtitled "Prog 1", has perhaps as a consequence been deemed "too dense" for Radio 4. Which it is, but that's another post.) Yet for some reason Issue 7 of Power Socket was to be the last I completed. I'm not sure if I gave up, or decided to wait until I was better at it, or maybe I just started enjoying school a bit more. I suspect the truth is - and my "visual notebooksW back this up - that there was just so much out there now to copy, why bother sticking with a super-hero serial? In the Autumn of 1986 Dad suggested we take Power Socket Issue 7 along to show to my new heroes at a signing. I did. "What do you think?" he asked. Alan Moore said "Um, I'm more of a writer," and was lovely. Kev O'Neil (responsible for the image above) said "Do you lay it out first? You should try laying it out." And Pat Mills, to my surprise, turned out not be a woman. I can't remember what he said. Or John Wagner. But I've got the signatures. And all have remained my heroes.
And one day I hope I'll get to show them what I've made since.
